Times Higher Education - Beware the sharp clause

"Yet the purported contract probably mentions some risible fee or limits the contributor's hard-won reward in some insulting fashion - specifying, perhaps, that he will get the right to purchase copies of his own work at an outrageous but nominally reduced price. Clauses appear, imposing on the contributor the trouble and cost, for example, of obtaining picture rights and indexing or of conforming to the publishers' peculiar house style - tasks better assigned to professionals, who can do them quickly and efficiently. The most iniquitous new clause deprives the author of copyright. If Pfeffelhuncker assents, he will be unable to reprint his piece in his collected works, or repeat any part of it in a related work, or grant the right to reproduce it for a different readership. He will not be able to put it on his own website, if he has one. If anyone should value it enough to translate or adapt it, Pfeffelhuncker will never see the financial benefit. If students or teachers make copies, the fees will go elsewhere. To use his own work, Pfeffelhuncker will have to crave the publisher's permission, wasting time and trouble and risking the prospect of inertia or rebuff in response....We should remember what copyright is for - "to encourage learning", as the first British copyright law said, or, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization: "To encourage a dynamic culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public." Every time an academic forfeits copyright, the world is impoverished, as the incentive to produce original and valuable work wanes. When publishers or other commissioning bodies demand copyright, authors should resist. My work, I fear, will never have much commercial value, but as a matter of principle I never agree to surrender copyright. I concede happily what publishers really need: a licence to reproduce it themselves. Fellow scholars who value their work can, if they wish, do the same."